#ethics/6 entries

I think a lot about what the future will look like. I always did but even more so since I had a baby. To me it feels like we’re not in a steady state right now. Things are volatile and changing fast. It feels like this pace of change can’t possibly last forever. But it also seems obvious that LLMs are going to dramatically change the nature of my work, and many types of work, permanently.

I am effectively required to use AI at work now, so for now I’ve decided to accept that reality, remain employed as a software engineer, and learn how to use these new tools well. At this point I can’t see software engineering ever going back to the way it was before coding agents. But finding these tools useful doesn’t resolve any of my reservations about AI adoption more broadly, especially with how the main companies selling it act in society.

If anything, using AI every day has made the tension more obvious to me. I think it's possible for a technology to be genuinely useful when applied well, use it regularly, and still insist its makers be accountable for its externalities. AI may be unusually capable and unpredictable, but unpredictability does not erase the responsibility of the people who build, deploy, profit from, and use it to act with care in society.

Upon closer inspection, they are all calling for the same thing: a view of AI systems as being so advanced and capable that no entity, human or corporate, could possibly be responsible for their actions. … This narrative is gaining traction as AI models become more complex and frontier labs reveal their incapability of containing the agents they’ve built. But we need to be careful not to buy into a carefully crafted fiction at the expense of real human lives.

I agree. I think this notion that increasing the sophistication or unpredictability of a tool somehow absolves its makers of any responsibility for its use is absurd. This is the perpetual fight the tech industry keeps having with governments and communities. Regulation has never been able to keep up with technology, and every time companies release a new capability they deploy it at enormous scale and then argue that because this technology is bigger or more sophisticated or whatever the existing expectations around liability and responsibility no longer apply. But scale and complexity don't erase accountability.

If you build a system, decide how it operates, where it deploys, profit from its operation, and have the ability to reduce the harms it causes but simply refuse to do so, you do bear some responsibility for those harms.

The fundamental flaw of framing AI as “conscious” by borrowing the language of neuroscience or animal rights is that it conveniently clouds the issue of what AI is: corporate-built software, with countless billions of dollars in investment behind it and an expectation that countless trillions of dollars in revenue will be generated from it for a few builders and investors.

I think this really gets at one of the core ethical issues with AI and how the companies developing it operate. There are some benefits to AI, but they almost exclusively accrue to a small and elite group of tech industry leaders. The costs and harms, meanwhile, are externalized -- onto creators whose work becomes training material, people subjected to synthetic abuse, workers whose jobs are disrupted, communities absorbing infrastructure and environmental costs, and ordinary people who become unwilling participants in experiments conducted at enormous scale. The asymmetry matters.

If society and average people are expected to tolerate substantial risk and disruption for the sake of pursuing the frontier, there needs to be some commensurate, convincing public benefit. Making a small number of already unimaginably wealthy individuals vastly wealthier is not a good enough reason for the rest of us to take on these risks.

There are currently dozens of cases around the world in which AI companies have been sued for a wide range of abuses. Grieving loved ones, aggrieved creators, and violated individuals have accused companies of willfully enabling self-harm or harm to others, generating child sexual-abuse material and nonconsensual nudes, reproducing copyrighted materials, and provoking psychosis.

Like any problematic technology, it’s really easy to overlook the harms it causes when we are benefiting from it. This isn't unique to AI, but it raises important questions around accountability. When a technology has both beneficial and harmful uses, the question becomes how to develop and deploy it responsibly. We should not just accept "we have no such obligation" as an answer.

Systems do not “attack” because they went “rogue” or are “manipulative” or “malicious.” Harms occur because companies were negligent in their rush to sell their products to as many people as possible to meet revenue targets.

I think this is very important distinction. When an AI system causes harm, describing the model itself as "malicious", "deceptive", "rogue", or "out of control" obfuscates the chain of human decisions that put it in a position to cause that harm in the first place. People built the model, trained it, set up the safeguards, and chose the conditions under which it got released. A small group of humans made deliberate decisions on behalf of everyone else about what level of risk was acceptable.

Responsibility can be distributed but it cannot be abdicated. Otherwise we end up with an untenable accountability vacuum where the more powerful and autonomous a technology becomes, the less responsibility its creators bear for deploying it. That is obviously backwards.

Discussing AI in anthropomorphic terms is a trap, distorting a legal system intended to protect us into one that protects corporate interests at the cost of countless human lives.

I think this is at least one small thing we can do to steer the conversation in the right direction. Language matters. It's easy to slide into describing agentic systems in anthropomorphic terms, but we have to draw a line where that metaphor starts implying legal and moral consequences. AI is a technology, a tool. Not a person, not an independent actor with agency or an entity separate from the person using it. It is built, owned, operated, and deployed by people.

We have to hold those wielding this tool accountable for the harm they cause or we will be living in a world where those with access to it are free to act with impunity destroying the lives of those who don’t.

I apparently can’t hold a conversation with a friend, post on social media, or even daydream idly without the topic eventually turning to bloody A.I.

It’s not always me who brings it up, but it often is; I’ve rarely known such a “sticky” subject.

This resonates. Unlike Oliver Burkeman I do use AI more or less all day every day at work. But I also find myself talking about it so much more than I need to.

One answer is that the general topic is an unusually powerful trigger for a major disease of our times: overthinking.

This is an insightful take. Whatever you think of AI, it is upending many industries very quickly and has implications one way or another for the future of society. Whether you’re for or against, whether you use it or not, it’s become very difficult to ignore its pervasiveness in day to day discourse anymore. This diagnosis of the reason being that it naturally triggers all kinds of pre-existing neuroses about our place in the economy, the nature of our relationships, even what it means to be human in the first place, seems apt. These are all heavy, anxiety-inducing topics for many people and the way AI is often discussed very nonchalantly by those creating it as though it might ruin all of our lives is a bit hard to ignore.

Whatever the details, this is where overthinking kicks in, because it feels like the solution to the anxious feelings in your body is to scurry off into your head and think some more, read some more, argue some more, maybe use A.I. some more… But scurrying off to your head doesn’t work…

I think this is one of the key things software people get wrong about the world, and the source of a lot of the friction the tech industry is running into with regards to AI adoption. There’s a pervasive tendency among us to really highly overvalue intelligence, but not every problem can be resolved by just thinking harder.

Lives immeasurably fuller and more interesting than can be dreamt of in Silicon Valley’s ideology. Lives that encompass vastly more than what software can do.

I find this vision of what a good life can be so much richer and more appealing than what’s on offer in my tech bubble. It’s important to remember this. At the end of the day computers are just tools we can use to facilitate some of the things we want to work on, but have very little to do with what it means to live a full and interesting life.

I was excited to see that this is the first module in a new Coursera course I'm doing. I've long thought that ethics are missing from software development, and I think it's more important than ever to care about the consequences of what we're doing and building in this age of AI. This course on building agents literally opens with this statement:

This module is for professionals and data scientists aiming to build responsible AI.

I'm really heartened to see that building responsibly is becoming a legitimate concern, at least in some corners of the industry.

By bridging theory and practice, the program empowers you to lead initiatives that prioritize accountability, ensuring your AI systems deliver immense value without compromising integrity or public trust.

I'm looking forward to this.

Well this is awkward. Literally yesterday I wrote “the hard part of software engineering was never writing the code.” I concede that that way of describing what’s happening to the software industry is a bit lazy and exaggerated.

Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is clear many aspects of work and life will be transformed—including programming.

This definitely feels true to me. My day to day is already completely unrecognizable compared to a year ago and I wouldn’t have known how to even begin describing the nature of my job now if you’d asked me to only a few months ago.

If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?

This is answerable though, in terms of economics. How hard a skill is isn’t what determines its price. It’s true that a very small proportion of the labour force is willing to put up with solving abstract symbolic logic puzzles for 40 hours a week, but the main reason software engineers are so highly paid is more because the marginal cost of scaling software is effectively zero than anything to do with the work itself. Lots of jobs are harder and pay less.

I have met many programmers throughout my career, and very few of them want to talk to stakeholders, much less customers (exceptions are freelancers and founders, especially of software development shops). And, “having clarity on the priorities” boils down to “just tell me what to do and don't switch it up every two days

Relatable.

Whoever you are, don't outsource your understanding, judgement, empathy and taste to AI.

This feels like the most important takeaway for this moment. What drives me more crazy than anything else these days is people trying to pass off AI generated output as their own. It’s lazy and inconsiderate to ask someone to read piles of slop on your behalf, but that’s not even what I hate the most about it. It’s the abdication of our unique human ability to relate to other humans that gets me. I wish people would stop pretending like generated AI output could ever replace human interaction.